


Trust

by fluidstatic



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Autistic Sherlock, Demisexual Sherlock, F/M, Oral Sex, demisexual molly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-30 22:01:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluidstatic/pseuds/fluidstatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly knew Sherlock would be on the run for a bit, but it certainly hadn’t occurred to her that he’d take her with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Ignite my cells, one by one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021329) by [Goldenheartedrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldenheartedrose/pseuds/Goldenheartedrose). 



Molly knew Sherlock would be on the run for a bit, once the blood on the pavement below St. Bart’s had been cleared away. It certainly hadn’t occurred to her that he’d take her with him.

She’d been a little too quick, perhaps, to tell Sherlock that he could stay at her flat until Mycroft found more secure accommodations for him. Despite the way he curled into himself, slouching on the slab, looking shaken and shaky and mostly not-himself, when she made the suggestion he’d skewered her with a strange and disapproving expression.

“...No,” he’d said, eventually.

Molly had found herself standing in her flat what felt like a few seconds later, zipping up an overstuffed suitcase. She was trying to decide whether or not she could trust her senses when she heard him say,

“You can trust the neighbors to look after the cat; they like you well enough. Now, I’ve let you dawdle long enough. Hurry.”

He’d dyed his hair while she’d packed (very ginger), taken her flat iron to his curls (where on earth did he learn to use it), and wrestled on a tight, ratty t-shirt with a picture of Van Morrison on the front (probably because he thought it was suitably plebian for his purposes, the vain daft idiot). He stood in the doorway of her bathroom looking entirely incongruous to her understanding of him, except for the stubbornly stoic expression on his face.

“If you’re going to insist on babysitting me, then the least you can do is look a bit less startled about the prospect.” He leaned in the doorway, looked at her slightly down his nose, raked his fingers through his newly straightened ginger fringe.

A hot upset feeling did a figure eight in Molly’s stomach and slithered past her sternum into her throat.

“I’m not babysitting you,” She blurted, unsure whether to be cross or hurt. “I’m your temporary physician. You’re not well, Sherlock.”

He rolled his eyes - almost looking like himself again. The hot feeling in her throat returned to her belly and made a fist (of all the ungrateful).

“You gave yourself a damned concussion pulling this nonsense,” she heard herself say - again, “and you of all people should know that there’s no telling how long your nervous system is going to play tricks. If you pass out at the wrong moment, or choke on your own vomit in some hotel room, Mycroft will likely blame me, so clearly my job isn’t over. I’m going to help you, because you asked me to, and I’m going to do a proper job of it.”

When he didn’t scoff again, She realized her voice had gone a little louder than she’d intended — but his face had changed. Before she could figure out what his eyes were trying to say, he grabbed her suitcase and dragged it to the elevator for her without a word.

She scooped Toby off the couch, stroked him twice, kissed him fiercely on the top of the head when he meowed in confusion - then dumped him gracelessly onto her pillow (his favorite forbidden place to sleep).

“It’ll be fine,” she told him, and strode out of the flat.

-*-

Molly goes where she is needed, when she knows she is needed, and she doesn't look back.

-*-

The first night in the hotel room Sherlock has booked (and nearly at random, as far as she can tell), Molly is trying to immerse herself in a book - and think as little as possible - when she hears a spectacular bang in the bathroom. To her horror, it is not followed by a colourful string of curses.

She bolts to the bathroom door and picks the lock with a paperclip, desperately trying to quell shaking hands. The silence on the other side of the door is nauseating, and wehen she finally wrestles the door open (sticky door jamb and creaky hinges rattling her further), Sherlock lies on the tile, soaking wet, naked, unconscious. She grabs his dressing gown and flings it over him, shoves him onto his side. She’d be more gentle with him if she weren’t so cross with fear.

“Sherlock,” she mutters, appalled - “Why are you trying to give yourself another concussion?”

He starts awake a few seconds later, curses, lurches to his knees. Molly barely has time to turn away from his soaked naked body before he vomits, loudly, into the sink. She stands back and watches him, dismayed, until he finally wipes his mouth and groans

“Fucking... migraine.”

Poor Sherlock, she thinks, flicking the light off as she retreats. “Right. Paracetamol, water, clothes. Don’t move,” she chides, over her shoulder (careful not to look at him, disheveled, too thin, shaking).

“Woudn’t... dream,” he retorts in a lurching voice, and she hears him vomit again as she fumbles in his bag, looking for anything resembling pajamas.

When she returns to his side she can’t help but rest a steadying hand on his shoulder; the muscle there is visibly tight, jumping with the exertion of his shivers. He gulps down the painkiller and leans sprawling againt the tile, ignoring his own nakedness.

“Oh, Sherlock.”

Molly doesn’t realize she’s spoken aloud until he winces, scowls at her with his eyes closed. Her voice must not be helping at all. 

“Ugh,” he replies, gracelessly. “Tedious.” 

Molly decides this is his way of thanking her.

She kneels guiltily and begins to dress him, just as carefully as she did when he woke up on her slab at Bart’s. He was perfunctory and nearly bored, before - distracted, trying to ask her about Jim’s corpse, about John, had she seen him, had he been led away yet, was he safe. This time he actually relaxes fractionally into Molly’s touch and keeps his mouth shut. His wet hair frizzes and curls. She helps him crawl into a shirt, strokes a wayward lock off his forehead, checks for fever.

When she helps him into bed, he falls asleep so quickly she’s almost worried he’s fainted again. But his breathing is even and his mouth is slackened in the characteristic deadweight sleep of someone who’s just had a frieght train roll through their head. He’ll sleep like a coma patient.

Relieved, Molly camps on the floor, and tries not to think about the fact that she almost kissed his cheek as she tucked him into bed.

-*-

They never leave the hotel room together. The shades are always drawn. She keeps all the lights on when she isn’t sleeping. Days seep into each other, and he goes god-knows-where, and she waits for him.

He wears a shorter jacket now, waterproof, collar still turned up. He brings her real food from convenience stores and chippies, vending machine coffee that she doctors with the little pots of cream he steals from diners. Every time he comes back to the hotel room his accent has changed just slightly. He greets her in an odd unfamiliar voice and she smiles. He stalks through the tiny suite and drops a sandwich in her lap on his way to the kitchenette, but she doesn’t open it right away. She likes to watch him make tea and chuck leftover takeout into the microwave. He moves like a dancer when he’s hungry; he flips a plastic fork out of a takeaway bag, turns with an unconscious flourish toward the micro when it beeps.

“Progress?” Molly asks, as if he’s just come home from a shift at the bank and his work is just as boring as anything. She doesn’t ask him if he’s been shot at. He would tell her right off, if he had; that’s his way.

He'd tells her what he knows, if something had changed. She prepares to listen gravely, and commit as much of his swift explanations as she can to her memory - she may need to remember something later. But he merely shakes his head and flings himself onto the couch to sulk over his leftovers. Clearly nothing has presented itself.

Molly's mind twinges with the same old refrain - Poor Sherlock. She considers telling him that she can’t imagine what he’s going through, but decides she won’t. He’ll only sulk harder, or rant at her for daring to suggest he's anything less than composed and in control, he isn't a child, et cetera.

The book she tries to read turns out to be completely unable to distract her from the growing apprehension taking root behind her navel.

She's not sure she's being of any use.

-*-

“Why are you doing this?” Sherlock turns and snaps at Molly, out of nowhere. The second evening has offered nothing worth watching on the telly.

Molly taps her fork against her lip and looks at him sideways, chewing her cashew curry as slowly as she can. If she let him fight with her for no reason, she thinks, then nothing would ever get accomplished.

“If you weren’t what I think you are - or what you think you are - would I still want to help you?” she asks.

Feeding him his own honesty and desperation seems to give him pause; he stares at her and says nothing more.

-*-

Sometime after supper (chinese food and horrible tea), Sherlock throws yesterday's newspaper across the room, and takes a deep breath. The rush of paper and almost-speech startles Molly her out of her book; The silence in the hotel room is immediately oppressive, and Sherlock is staring at her.

“Yes?” she ventures.

“Thank you, Molly.”

His face is a mask of propriety, but she can’t help but blush, as if he’s kissed her breathless.

-*-

Every twenty minutes or so, Molly makes the useless observation that Sherlock hasn't touched her since they left St. Bart's.

-*-

Molly doesn’t remember where her resentment of Sherlock’s self-absorption and stony silence turned the corner, but now she feels like she’s been lying on this foldaway bed beside him for most of her life. She remembers his dark curls but she doesn’t miss them. She's begun to study the ginger fringe he wears, and to like it (a bit). London’s Sherlock swept around in that gigantic coat, wearing John in his shadow like an article of clothing, plying her with quavers and little sudden compliments and awkward apologies.

But this Sherlock is hers, in a way. He doesn't say much, or try to charm her. Instead he brings her food, and doesn't do anything openly childish, and gives her ample space on the bed.

The bed has gotten smaller over the last three days. The neighbors don’t bicker or make love loudly, and since the telly grows exponentially more boring, Sherlock won’t even turn it on anymore. Molly contents herself with dusty decades-old potboiler romances, and Sherlock lies on his back, counting cracks in the ceiling.

“Water damage upstairs,” he says.

“I could tell the manager tomorrow.” Her tone is reasonable, but he looks annoyed.

“Suspicious,” he chides. 

She sets aside her book, suddenly inspired (and a bit fed up with him, really).

“Why are we doing this, Sherlock?”

His brows lift and knit together. In the watery quarter-light of the hotel room, his cheeks look hollower than usual.

“Of all the intolerably stupid questions, Molly — you’ve brought this upon yourself. You insist that I’ll need medical attention at some point, and so I’ve allowed you to coddle me to your heart’s content. When you’ve given me a clean bill of health, I’ll see to it that Mycroft returns you to London.”

He pauses, and she notices that his eyes are saying something vague and uncertain — but before she can parse it out he rolls over, presents his back to her.

A few hours later it’s storming fit to end the world, and Molly surmises that maintenance hasn’t bothered to fix the gutters on the building. A slick of rainwater catches on the molding around the window and makes a terribly invasive spattering noise, catching on all of Molly’s synapses. She tries desperately, and utterly fails, to close her eyes and relax her neck for the eighth time in five minutes.

Whoever is in the room downstairs can’t sleep either. She hears his computer sing itself to life. In a few minutes she hears a tinny indistinct voice that seems to be reading off the last of a stale news bulletin from the day before; a few seconds pass and an advert comes on, jangling louder. She sighs.

Sherlock makes a small exasperated noise of agreement, and she jumps. He turns half toward her, brows lifted, eyes caught in the light and almost silver.

“I don’t want you to be too hasty in declaring me fit for discharge,” his tone is a conversational one, as if the last thing he said was just a few seconds past. Their calves are touching under the thin, abrasive wool blanket on the bed.

“I’m not going to leave you to your own devices if you’re going to keep coming back from your mysterious errands with cuts to stitch up.” 

His hesitant expression solidifies to his usual mild boredom. “I can suture my own wounds, Molly.” 

“Not all of them,” she says, very gently laying her hand on the bandage she’d applied to his right shoulder that evening.

He squints. “You’re being smug.”

“What? Sherlock. I’m being reasonable. Why would you say — Wait, does John give you smug faces after he’s patched you up?”

Sherlock goes very still. The heater clicks off and the room falls into a deep judgmental stillness.

Molly shoves her eyes closed, cursing herself. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” his throat sounds dry.

"You love him. I shouldn’t bring him up right now. You… you miss him. You did this for him.”

He shifts on the mattress, bracing himself to say - something she probably doesn’t want to hear.

“Molly…”

“…No, I’m being insensitive. I shouldn’t just blurt out everything that comes to mind, It’s…”

“It’s what we do, Molly Hooper.”

She hadn’t noticed until this moment: He’s laid his hand on top of hers.

“What …we… What?”

"We say what needs to be said, and get on with our lives. Even if there are consequences, we get it out in the open. Who will hear, otherwise? Who will understand?”

Molly doesn’t know what to say to that, so she doesn’t say anything. Sherlock raises his eyebrows in an odd, kind, encouraging expression she’s only seen him wear out of sarcasm. She feels herself shake her head, mystified.

His eyes slide from her face; he considers.

 “If I never broadcast my observations I’d be …bloody hell, dead or incarcerated or coked to the gills in an alley. And did you ever stop to wonder, Molly - If you never spoke your mind, then what would become of the rest of us?”

“I don’t know what you mean... I don’t count,” Molly says, and realizes she’s lost track of how many times she’s protested it.

“You think you don’t count because nobody’s made a fuss over you.” there’s a knot between Sherlock’s brows. “But has it occurred to you that nobody feels the need to make a fuss over you? Reliable, clever, steady Dr. Hooper…” — his voice does a flip in his mouth, shifts accent — “If you need something done right, she’ll do it. And isn’t she a sweet little thing? But don’t make a fuss over her. She wouldn’t like it.” he smirks, humourless, and in his usual drawl, suggests “Perhaps they’re wrong?”

Molly wonders if she’s ever heard one of Sherlock’s sentences end in a true question mark before.

“Wrong? What about?” she’s mystified.

He looks suddenly bored and turns toward the ceiling again. “As a point of interest, actually, your earlier observation is a bit off.”

“What… observation?”

His fingertips skid over her knuckles before his hand disengages from hers. He turns to look at her again as his palm slides up her arm, firmly, and she suddenly wants to roll him on top of her, feel his weight like an anchor on her body.

“I don’t love John,” he says.

She blinks herself out of the sudden wave of desire that’s blown over her. “But —”

“I trust him.” his voice is eerily quiet, thick with the weight of contemplation. “I trust that he’ll… understand my temperament, and endure my outbursts, and offer me enough feedback on my observations to be of use in the larger scheme of my work.” His eyes slide out of focus, as if he’s reciting. “I trust him to tell me when I have jeopardized some aspect of my relations with others, and I… am in his debt. In many ways. Which is why…”

“Which is why you’ve done this,” Molly finishes for him. “You don’t know how to repay him, but you’re hoping this will even the scales a bit? I mean, it’s a daft way of showing it, but even I know what you’re up to. I’m not thick.”

Sherlock shakes his head. “…Which is why,” he repeats, squeezing her shoulder with an immense, insistent hand, “I am able to see the same reliability in you.”

Molly’s head suddenly feels as if it’s not on her shoulders anymore. Her limbs go a little tight.

“W… What do you… mean?”

He looks genuinely puzzled, now - almost amused. “Surely you’ve already sorted out…?”

He nudges closer to her and rests his cheek on her bicep. Startled by the intimacy, drowsy, she automatically wraps her arm around his neck, her palm resting on his shoulder blade. He’s so very warm; of course he is; he’s thin as a whippet and runs just as much. His metabolism is its own damned furnace. The corner of her mouth twitches at the thought.

His mouth twitches too, uncertain, but then he takes a breath, seems to reach through his memory a bit, and says

“I trust you, Molly Hooper. Didn’t I say it before?” His tone is a little mystified.

“You did,” she admits, thinking of the flip in her belly when he’d first appeared in her lab, eyes wild with anxiety and sleeplessness, face moon white from low blood sugar, voice shaking. She’d told herself it was the need to survive talking. She’d told herself his confession was just a necessity, the same as any odd compliment or smile he’d given her.

“And what else did I say?” he asks, as if quizzing a child.

The rain patters harder. Molly’s whole body feels like it’s thinning out to a stream of water, spattering over the sharp edges of her own thoughts, pooling in a trembling droplet on the dagger-point of Sherlock’s considering expression.

“I… I don’t…”

He leans his head off of her bicep, bringing his face closer until her entire field of vision is his face, fringed with those striking but peculiar coppery curls.

“You asked me what I needed,” he whispers.

“I… I did.”

He was so frightened when she’d asked. His hands were trembling. There were tears in his eyes -- Of course, even for all that, she’d told herself it was an act. She’d told herself that Sherlock Holmes was just the sort of man to be dramatic when he wanted things his way. She’d told herself she wasn’t doing anything above and beyond for him; John and Mrs. Hudson and DI Lestrade would thank her one day, and so she would set out to do it for them. She’d do it because if she didn’t Jim would win, and resisting Sherlock’s charms would be more selfish than emotionally fortifying.

But now Sherlock is not being needlessly intense. His massive hand holds her shoulder tightly, calmly. His eyes are steady and dry. His body shifts millimeters closer every time he takes in a breath.

“We’ve established that I need you,” he breathes, “and therefore, may I ask you a question?”

“Mm?”

“What do  _you_ need?”

His eyes shiver over her face. She realizes his legs have wound around hers, and she’s staring at his mouth. She’s making a list of all the smiles she’s seen on that mouth, and all the scowls. She’s counting the times he’s said her name, and remembering the time he’d grabbed her by the shoulders in a hallway of St. Bart’s, spun her round on her feet, marched her ahead of him. She’s rifling through the file that is Sherlock Holmes and she’s finding herself on more pages than she had cared to notice.

“I… I don’t know,” she stammers.

And he’s here, practically in her arms, and there’s something very like kindness in his eyes. She’s not sure if she believes it, but it is there.

“Perhaps you’d like it if someone …made a fuss over you,” he muses, “If just for a few minutes?”

“Make a fuss… how?”

His chin tilts downward, and his eyes sparkle with — what — fondness? Desire?

“Since you’re being delightfully slow on the uptake, I suppose I need to say that I would like to kiss you, Molly Hooper.” His voice is so candid and kind it nearly makes her dizzy. “So, that said - would you mind if…?”

“N… No… I wouldn’t, actually,” she says, deciding that this just may be the understatement of the century.

He exhales (he’s relieved!) and, before she can be surprised, she’s folded close to him — so close! — And his lips, oh, his lips pressed against hers are beyond description.

His warmth and breadth and weight are like a magnet. She tangles herself in him and he plucks her up from the mattress, and she has the silliest mental image of the tide going out, revealing that an island isn’t an island after all. She’s looked across the water at him all this time, but now the tide’s gone out and she’s tied to him, just as she always was.

“Firmer, please,” he mumbles, casually.

She realizes she’s been skating her fingernails along the back of his neck and presses her palm there instead. “Sorry,” she says without thinking, “That must be maddening. Here...” She flattens her palm against his nape and he bites her lip gratefully, slides one arm under the small of her back. The space between them is decimated, and Molly floats in a cocktail of disbelief and lust.

“I’ve not made love in some time,” Sherlock says, into her shoulder. “I’m… caught unprepared, I’m afraid.”

_He didn’t just suggest - He did - He wants to? Oh my God, this isn’t real._

Molly steadies herself, feels herself at a distance as she tries to be an adult, tries to behave as if sex is on her radar all the time.

“I’d… rather we didn’t… er,” she says, and so much for eloquence.

When Sherlock pulls back from her, looking horrified and repentant all at once, Molly has to kick herself mentally. With his ginger hair he looks like a terrified schoolboy. She bites her lips. “No,” she says, hoping she sounds soothing, “It’s just, I would rather we didn’t — You know. Go so far as to involve condoms.”

A voice in her head hisses _You are an idiot._

“You don’t enjoy penetration,” Sherlock translates flatly, and there’s not a whit of confusion or disappointment in his tone.

“I really don’t,” she admits, blushing sadly.

There is a lopsided, uncertain pause when she thinks he is going to get out of bed, but --

“I won’t suffer for it,” Sherlock says then, in the same flat (almost clinical) tone. “I don’t care to be penetrated, either, to be candid.” He looks thoughtful, as if he’s about to leap from bed and start scribbling in a notebook about something psycho-sexual in nature - but then he kisses her again, deep and slow, and she groans with relief. She feels his mouth twist into a smirk as he skates further kisses across her cheekbone, her jaw, her throat.

“With certain aversions kept in mind, what can I do for you, Miss Hooper?” his whispering breath is warm on her shoulder.

She wordlessly sits up, slips out of her camisole, and looks down at him. He takes in the sight of her breasts with interest, licking his bottom lip distractedly. She drapes the camisole over a chair, lets her eyes drift over his shirt. He takes the hint and sends his shirt to the floor.

“I’m out of practice, too,” she says, stalling a little while she drinks in the sight of his torso (swimmer lean, of course, but also decorated with more scars than she’d expected).

“I’m sure whatever effort you make will be more than appreciated,” he says, but his arch tone is cut by the beautiful smile on his face.

She crawls into his lap, and then the exquisite warmth of his chest is against her skin. She tries to fold herself smaller, let herself be curled up into his entirely. She wants to disappear into his strangeness and his sudden transparent affection. She wants to kiss him forever.

He plucks at the drawstring on her sweatpants, slips his fingers past the waistband, and cups his palm around her hipbone. His fingertips tickle, and she’s suddenly aware of every tiny hair on her body, and she feels her nerves crawl. _Want,_ she thinks, spinning internally; _don’t want. Oh, bollocks, how do I --_

“Firmer?” she suggests breathlessly. “Tickling.”

Sherlock presses his wide palm into her hipbone, humming apology, stroking up her waist and back down, warming her skin.

She laughs out loud, darkly, giddy with amazement - Sherlock’s smell in her nose, his tongue in her mouth, his hands on her breasts, his beautiful body right at her fingertips, _Hail Mary Full of Grace, how did this happen and please let it never stop._

Her laugh startles him and he pulls back a fraction, considering her happiness. He flashes a smile, lopsided, and dives one hand into her hair, leaning, tipping her center of gravity back onto the mattress.

When Molly was a girl, she noticed that whenever she was truly happy she would lose pieces of time. Reading a book would devour hours that felt like seconds. Standing with her fists jammed in coat pockets on the shore as a child, she would forget hunger, thirst, cold. Now she wants every moment to hang around her like a smog, clinging to her skin. She wants to remember every measured, slow, firm touch from Sherlock’s hands. The heat hasn’t clicked on again, but she doesn’t care; Sherlock’s warmth is the only heat she wants. She is already trying to memorize the flavor of every one of his kisses. She wants to preserve those ludicrous ginger curls in amber, and freeze the way they fly around his head like a glory in a painting of a saint. Someday he will dye his hair black again, and this wild miracle will be a memory. _But the best thing of all is that it will be_ _my_ _memory,_ Molly tells herself; _this is mine. I am right here, right now, and Sherlock bloody Holmes is mine, he trusts me, and I love him —_

Molly has never loved anyone before. The realization comes over her like a sudden loss of oxygen, just as Sherlock’s mouth closes around the soft aureole of her left breast - and suddenly she is wildly, utterly weeping.

He lifts his head, looks at her through his lashes with concern. “Oh,” he says, as if she’s just told him something interesting - and he _would,_ wouldn’t he?

He’s so lovely, and she’s messing it up, after all this time and all the awfulness and all the silliness with Christmas she still can’t let go of, it’s trying to slide off her and vanish but she can’t let it go, she’s just not good enough for him, she never was, oh  _God._

“Molly. I apologize,” he says, pulling away.

“Sherlock, I,” Molly stammers, reaching for him. “I, …no. I’m not crying because I… I’m sorry. D-don’t… don’t leave. I’m. I’m sorry.”

-*-

She’s thinking about Jim.

It’s excruciating to think that she told Jim that she loved him. It was their second date; she’d been loose-limbed and tipsy, and had just told an awful scathing joke about ‘someone’ she knew; She’d been talking about Sherlock, though she hadn’t used his name. God, she’d been so  _proud_  of herself for slagging him off behind his back, and Jim had laughed uproariously and said, a little fondly, than he loved her - the way one might say  _love your shoes, loved your dissertation on fungal spores in decomposition, loved that episode of East Enders last night._

And she’d said it back, woozy with vodka but earnest, because she thought perhaps, if she said it, she wouldn’t have to be _alone_ for the rest of her life — and damn her, she could have  _died._

She doesn’t say a word of it, but Sherlock rubs his mouth delicately with a few fingers and says, with only the smallest touch of bitterness -

"Moriarty won’t be hurting you any longer, Molly."

“Sherlock,” Molly repeats. He leans very close and touches her cheek, because she is still weeping and he is obviously at a loss.

“I  _never_ do this, and I’m _terrified,_ because it’s been so long and I hurt so much but I  _trust_  you,” she babbles at last.

Trust is so much different than love. Love is slippery and ubiquitous and everyone wants it, but nobody has it, and isn’t that the problem? Supply and demand have always been badly out of sync. But Sherlock is mad and brilliant, and though he goes off on his awful tangents, and burns all his bridges, and goes diving off bloody buildings in broad daylight, spattering the pavements and leaving his nearest and dearest to suffer — even after all that, she’s never trusted a man the way she trusts him.

He catches her intent, and she watches it sink into his mind like a stone.

“Molly Hooper,” he says, hoarsely, and then his mouth is all over her body, skating quickly and earnestly down her belly, and though she feels her sweats and pants sliding down her legs, she can’t see anything but the ceiling through her tears.

Her fingers card through his hair as his tongue slides low, and lower. His lips close in a kiss around her and she jumps; an electrified yelp startles her until she realizes it’s her own voice. She rolls like a wave under his mouth, pressing his palm against the back of his head, not to grind him closer but to anchor him in place, to reassure. His eyes flick open and he pins them to hers, silver in the light of the streetlamp outside. She wonders, briefly, if she’s asleep - almost instantly he turns his head to laugh against her thigh.

“I assure you this is actually happening,” he hums.

“I didn’t say it w…”

“…Your eyes did.”

He hooks his arms under her legs and continues, the shock of his tongue slamming her back onto the mattress, drawing a liquid surprised moan out of her.

Seconds slip together and lose their separateness. Time folds in on itself and stops making sense. Molly’s entire brain is flooded with the way Sherlock presses his hands into her hipbones, nuzzles her. He flicks his eyes closed to savor her, and just when she thinks she’s lost hold of reality he flicks them open again, keen to watch her melt. She’s made of water, now, she’s sure of it; somewhere along the way he’s turned her into a pool of something completely transparent and clean and warm. He moans into her, quietly, his eyes soft with appreciation, and she’s never seen anything like this, never felt anything like this.

“Sherlock,” she manages, because she’s never let anyone touch her like this; she needs him to know, to understand. “Sher-”

One of his impossibly long arms reaches up the length of her body, and his index finger rests against her bottom lip -  _Hush._ She looks down the length of her body at him, dazed, and finds his eyes blown black with lust and wonder, his brow furrowed softly.

Stunned by the tenderness in his eyes, she flies apart.

He groans, long and full, against her sex. His hips lift from the mattress and, through her white-hot dizzy confusion, she realizes he’s caught himself in his fist, pulling hard, groaning into her. She clutches her thighs around his shoulders and rides, she coasts through her shattering until it’s wrung everything out of her; she's dazed, coarsely satisfied at the way it seems to punch through her.

Her anxieties and confusion tear away from her as she opens her eyes and locks onto Sherlock, decimated by a sudden flash of fire from his eyes.

He's leaned back from her onto his heels, and his mouth falls open as he pulls himself, beautifully wrecked. He gasps with every jerk of the wrist, one, two, three, four times —

“… _Molly.”_

His face crumples when he comes, spilling over his hand, her thighs. She exclaims over him, wordless, amazed, so touched.

"You," he pants. "You..."

“Beautiful,” she manages, pulling him onto the mattress, folding him in close. “You’re so beautiful.”

“…You… count,” he slurs at last, breathless. “I’ve… trusted you. From the start. Molly, I... Molly.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” she says, stroking her palms down his back, kissing his shoulder with firm mouth, overjoyed and on the verge of sobbing again. “Sherlock.”

-*-

Molly wakes to the sound of the kettle boiling.

“There’s no more Lapsang,” Sherlock calls lazily, over the whistling. “We’ll have to choke down the proprietary stuff until Mycroft’s supposed ‘compensatory cheque’ arrives… I would have bought more already, but the shops don’t open until eight, and I’m likely to get the wrong brand.”

“It wouldn’t hurt if you tried to do a little of the shopping ‘round here,” Molly calls back, as if they’ve been in domestic bliss for years, “And besides, you know I trust you.”

Sherlock turns away from the kitchenette and stares at her, hard. His mouth is a line, but his eyes dance.

“Molly,” he drawls, “Don’t be tedious.”

She simply stares at him, faking defiance, until his lashes lower; he smiles.

She opens her arms to him.

In the few strides it takes him to get back to the bed and crawl in, folding himself all around her, Molly has only enough time to think This is what all the fuss has been about, this is love.

“It’s in your nature, I suppose,” he drawls, into her hair. “You are tedious, prattling, and incomprehensibly sentimental, after all.”

“Prattling -- I prattle? Of all the people to tell anyone else that they prattle!” She smacks him, lightly. “You’re melodramatic, and grim, and completely impossible.”

“And yet, here we are.” He looks at her carefully, his face beaming with surprise, an open book.

She folds her head against his chest, and finds it fits there.

“Yes. Here we are.”

**Author's Note:**

> After reading "Ignite My Cells One By One," I was struck by a terribly strong need to let Molly and Sherlock have a vaguely similar experience - getting emotionally close, almost despite themselves, and landing happily (and haphazardly) in bed.
> 
> Thanks to Goldenheartedrose, for writing such a lovely fic, and for pointing out that the demisexual Sherlock tag is in dire need of filling in. Love also to Dani (the-cat-is-called-hamish.tumblr.com), for being an endless source of conversation surrounding Sherlolly, autism, communication issues, and how unbelievably inspiring the pairing can be.


End file.
